


And She Shall Reign...

by BeastOfTheSea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark Character, Dark!Hermione, Disturbing Themes, Dystopia, Gen, HP: EWE, Multifandom Drabble AU Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 03:41:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeastOfTheSea/pseuds/BeastOfTheSea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When she was young and naive, she thought that nothing could justify slavery and the end of liberation justified any means.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Like all children, however, she grew up, and put aside childish naivete; she came to realize that slavery was not such a bad thing - that slaves did not desire freedom, but a kind master.</i>
</p>
<p>In which Hermione takes over the Wizarding World.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And She Shall Reign...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [minkhollow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/minkhollow/gifts).



> Minkhollow's prompt: "Epilogue AU.
> 
> All is not well, and the leader of the next group of troublemakers... is Hermione."
> 
> **Trigger warnings for spousal abuse, character death, blasphemy, and an imminent dystopia.**
> 
> **Generic Harry Potter disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

When she was young and naive, she thought that nothing could justify slavery and the end of liberation justified any means.   
  
Like all children, however, she grew up, and put aside childish naivete; she came to realize that slavery was not such a bad thing - that slaves did not desire freedom, but a kind master. Indeed, she came to grasp that freedom _was_ a kind of slavery, an agonizing enslavement to the callous whims of fate. And, knowing this, what else could she do but set out to save the Wizarding World from its liberty?  
  
As the young Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald would have said, she did it For The Greater Good. Of course, she had learned from their mistakes - she ensured that she had no obnoxious family to drag her down, she collaborated with no unreliable, unstable Dark wizards, and she disposed of her overly-talented former friends _before_ she began her rise. That hadn't been too difficult, really. It appeared Harry's resistance to the Imperius had stemmed from the Horcrux alone, and without it, he proved quite docile and compliant. In fact, he made a marvelous figurehead... spared her quite a lot of obnoxious public appearances and social mingling - time much better spent in her study, conducting experiments and refining her arts.   
  
Oh, there was a resistance, as always - Longbottom, blast him, had proved to have acquired some _actual_ immunity to the Imperius during the Death Eaters' reign over the school, and he had taken as many members of Dumbledore's Army as possible with him when he went underground. Poor Ronald had been a causality of the ensuing guerrilla war - Not directly, no, but he had happened to be nearby when Harry had reported back to her that Longbottom had evaded capture for the seventh time. Fortunately, hasty insertion of his mutilated remains at the site of the latest skirmish had provided wonderful propaganda as to the utter depravity of the members of Longbottom's Army. The public, childlike beings that they were, still retained that unreasonable prejudice against "Dark" Arts, and there had certainly been enough hanging around Ronald's corpse to provide Rita Skeeter's various successors with enough fodder for a week's worth of papers.  
  
Longbottom's Army posed at most a minor threat, however. They did not understand the deep magic into which she had started delving after Dumbledore's demise, and they did not understand the methods of propaganda that she had fervently researched after S.P.E.W.'s abject failure - and, incapable of winning either the wands or hearts of the citizenry, they would always be a second-rate rebellion at best. She could have crushed them in a month, but she preferred to let them continue their feeble struggles... If her school days had done nothing else, they had taught her the inspirational value of an unseen, shadowy enemy bent on bringing down civilization as one knew it.   
  
It wasn't as if troublesome dissidents had a chance of killing her. She had learned from Voldemort's mistake and set up a fully-automated grid of spells to resurrect her as soon as was magically possible and in good health from her Horcrux - _She_ would not spent a decade lounging in some godforsaken Albanian forest! Nor had she fooled around with flashy trophies like Voldemort - she had turned an unremarkable chunk of rubble into her Horcrux, then had Harry stuff it in the caved-in portion of the tunnel leading up to the Chamber of Secrets. (Of course, she had also had him remove the basilisk corpse and all sundry pieces of it from the vicinity. She wasn't stupid.) The ambient magic in Hogwarts would wreck any fine-tuned tracking spells, the Chamber would be nigh-impossible for any non-Parselmouths to access if that failed (she had explicitly forbidden Harry to say the word 'Open' under any circumstances - which led to his speaking quite awkwardly on occasion, but she cared not a bit), and any hypothetical assassins would have a deuce of a time figuring out which piece of rubble was which if they somehow managed to get down there. Yes, especially since she'd had Harry booby-trap random pieces of rubble to do various nasty things (none of which would so much as dent her Horcrux, of course) if examined with magic...  
  
And it wasn't as though anyone would _object_ to her eternal reign. She had left Harry's Horcrux on a nice ice floe somewhere in Antarctica, so he would remain as the paperweight on the throne for a long time yet. And he would be a _sacrosanct_ paperweight, at that - Proper education of the youth ensured that every generation would grow up viewing him as the Wizarding Messiah, the Savior of the People, the Hero of Hogwarts, and the ideal Minister for Life of their great country. And she intended to see to it that the life in question lasted a very long time indeed - say, until the heat death of the universe.   
  
She was sure Dumbledore would approve. After all, it must have been evident to the old man that Harry lacked the right stuff for command on his own, but had nonetheless bestowed his personality cult to the not-so-humble person of Harry James Potter and constantly groomed Harry to be easily manipulated, subservient, and just arrogant enough that nobody guessed that, far from being strong-willed and stubborn-minded, he had hardly any will or mind of his own. He had made Harry, in short, into an ideal puppet - and who better to wield the strings, Dumbledore must have seen, than Dumbledore and Riddle's successor as the most brilliant student at Hogwarts?   
  
It was so blindingly obvious, in retrospect, that it stunned her that she had not seen it immediately after the final demise of Voldemort. What had Dumbledore left them? Ronald had been given an indulgence to save him from his own misguided behavior, Harry had been given a relic to encourage his martyrdom, and she - she had been given Dumbledore's own youthful inspiration. Clearly, he had meant her to succeed where he had failed. _Clearly._  
  
And she had indeed. For Wizarding Britain - and soon Wizarding Europe, and then the Wizarding World, and then _the world whole and entire_ \- had become the dominion of Hermione Granger and of Her Figurehead, and she would reign for ever and ever.   
  
Hallelujah, Hallelujah.  
  
 _And all was well._


End file.
